What can I say? I just haven't been keeping up with my
diary entries. It probably would have been longer, too, if
my freind aether
hadn't told me he set up an account.

Work

I *love* working for a small company. I used to work
for a medium sized company (Software Kinetics) which was
bought by a big company (xwave solutions). I thought it
was OK, but only because I hadn't seen the other side. Now
I work for a very small company (technically 4 of us,
realistically 6) and it rocks. What else can I say? They
even bought me a $400 chair!

Code

Need to write more of it. My UML modeller is coming
along very slowly, but it is coming along. I'm going to
try to work on it everyday this month. We'll see how long
that lasts.

Oh, it feels so good to be done. I think I'm going to
spend today cleaning up the trail of books, notes,
print-outs of other people's source code, and dirty dishes
I've left lying around the past couple weeks. Jane'll be
happy. And maybe if the weather gets better, I can spend
time reading and drinking beer on my virtual lawn (I've
astroturfed my balcony).

Radio Announcers

Just heard a speako (the vocal equivalent of a typo) on
the Guelph radio station. They just announced that we'd be
getting 75 centimetres of rain today! Ha! I think she
meant 75 millimetres... well... I hope she did ;) This is
good, though. Southern Ontario has been in drought
conditions for about the past 2 years so any precipitation
is welcome.

Ottawa Linux Symposium

My friends Alex, Aaron, and I have decided that we're
definitely going to OLS (is that an accepted abbreviation?).
This'll be my first Linux conference, so I'm
really excited. I've been to a bunch of concerts
at the Congress Centre before (Tea Party, Dave Matthews, New
Year's Eve bash ... maybe more), but nothing like this.
I'll probably stay at my mom's place in Almonte. She won't
be there (she going to England to visit my grandparents),
but my brother will be, and I don't see him enough, so it'll
be nice to hang out with him a bit.

All that's left is a paper that I'm finishing up now and
marking CIS*1000 exams, which ought to be good for a laugh
(from the midterm: "Who developed the first GUI?", 9/10
answers - "Microsoft". Uh... hello? Didn't you see Pirates
of Silicon Valley?)

Heh heh... for the record, I'm not challenging your
knowledge of C++ :) "C/C++" is just one of my pet peeves.
I mean, C and C++ are different languages! Yes,
their names are similar and their syntax is similar, but,
IMO, C doesn't have enough of C++ in it validate "C/C++".
I'll shut up now. Nobody wants to hear about this (and if
you do... why? I wouldn't ;).

Hello World

A friend of mine asked me about the origin of "Hello,
World!" programs. I don't have a clue where there started,
but I'm curious now. Anyone know? Update:Peeking
in the jargon file is leading me to believe it all started
with K&R. Is there any truth to this?

Yay, plugins!

I've updated the example
code that uses my dl::lib class
that I mentioned a few days ago. It even has a sample
plugin, now. Next thing to add is going to be support for
C++ name mangling so I can reference *real* member
functions. Anyone know of a reference for the C++ name
mangling scheme? Or should I just read the c++filt
source?

Certified jrennie
as an Apprentice for his insight into the Outcast
situation. I might upgrade that if he changes the "C/C++
and perl" in his notes section to "C, C++, and perl". I
often think that people who say "C/C++" just don't know C++
well enough to realize how different the languages are. I'm
not saying that's necessarily the case here, it's just a
trend I've noticed. (I'm probably asking for an Outcast
certification with that comment. ;)

My Thoughts

Anyway, I agree that it's pointless to have a class of
users that can do nothing. It sounds like a solution to a
problem that doesn't exist (not as of yet, anyway).

I also feel that a rating system that allowed negative
ratings would be most effective if everyone could rate
users, but the weighting of a user's rating (I can't help
but notice that that rhymes) should be proportional to their
status (i.e., a rating coming from a Master should mean much
more than a rating coming from an Outcast). I seem to
recall someone else mentioning this, too, but I can't
remember who.

ICQing with my friend Aaron today about
what kind of programming we'd like to do this summer in our
Free Time. It was funny because we accidently started
brainstorming about a project to help with (get this!)
brainstorming!

Anyway, the idea is to have a tiny little program
(tiny
enough that when you hit a special key mapped by your window
manager to launch it that it would appear almost
immediately) that will pop up a dialog box for you to type
the idea that just popped into your head. The idea would
then be stored in an ideas database (personal or shared) to
be revisited at another point in time to categorize, rate,
sort, delete (if the idea really sucked), expand on, etc.
using a seperate (less tiny) program when you had the
time.

In the case where a shared database is in use, you
can
rate or expand on other people's ideas creating a graph of
idea nodes (most likely a tree, but I haven't thought about
that enough yet).

The goal here is convenience. The amount of time
required to pop up the window, enter the idea, close the
window, and resume your previous activity must be
approximately equal to the time required to enter the
data.